A building automation system performs monitoring, open-loop control, and/or closed-loop control of process variables in technical systems in a building or in a campus. The technical systems are heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems, lighting and shading (e.g., blinds) devices, access control systems, security systems, and/or fire surveillance systems. In the building automation system, process variables, such as room air conditioning variables or events, are detected, evaluated, monitored, influenced and/or generated.
The building automation system typically includes programs and a number of computers or processors for their operation. Programming is provided to perform the distributed building automation. Due to the repetitive nature of floor plans, such as having multiple rooms of similar configuration, identical or similar control programs are present in a single or multiple field panel controllers within the building automation system. The individual control programs or applications are each adapted to include separately addressable point or BACnet objects for separate communication with the associated field devices connected with the controller. Moreover, control programs may be customized for the specific number of inputs of field devices, making the process inefficient for originally creating and inefficient for changing.
For initial design, a floor plan is provided. The building automation system, including the various programs, is created for the given floor plan. Engineering the programs may be inefficient. Over time, the floor plan may change. Altering the programming in the building automation system to account for the change is time consuming given the customized inputs and control loops. Each control program associated with a changed room is manually altered. Preloaded applications may need to be changed. Field bus technology features, such as LonMark-Binding or KNX-Binding (S-Mode, LTE-Mode) may be used to combine room masters and slaves and rearrange room slaves over time, but still require manual engineering. Dedicated engineering tools provide offline binding and loading of binding tables, which may save some time but still require design work to account for an alteration.